How do I secure wireless access?

This Blog had a simple to understand six step method to securing your home pc. It is hard in the IT industry sometimes to find simple straight foward directions. The six steps are taken from the url http://blogs.ittoolbox.com/networking/it_guy/archives/6-easy-steps-to-help-secure-your-home-wireless-6861

6 easy steps to help secure your home wireless
thatITguy (Director of IT) Posted 12/9/2005Comments (9) Trackbacks (0)
Securing your home wireless isn't that difficult, but it can take a few extra steps to accomplish. Before I get into this let me say that I'm by no means an expert in wireless security, these are just some suggestions that I have seen and have implemented on my own network at home. I'm going to use my equipment as an example and that is all it is, an example. Most of the suggestions will work on most wireless routers, but you may have to consult the manual on exactly how to configure your device. With that said here are a few ways to secure your wireless home network.Most of the wireless routers that people have at home come with some defaults turned on that will allow easy access to your system by the snooping onlooker. These defaults are all too often left unchanged and this can be a problem. So let's start with what a few things to update and/or change.
Change Admin account:I use a Linksys wireless router and by default the Admin account is accessed by leaving the username blank and admin as the password. So when I first setup my router I changed the password before I made any other configuration changes. This is just common sense, because you don't want anyone else to be able to get on your router and make changes, and wouldn't you look like a fool if someone did, and they used the default password. I would also recommend changing the password regularly.
Change the SSID (Service Set Identifier):Make this unique, don't leave it set to default. Why? Because when someone scans for open wireless networks and sees one that says Linksys, then they know two things right off the bat, 1) What brand of equipment you are using and 2.) a starting point to break in. The second thing I would do with the SSID is turn off the broadcast. If they can't see it, it makes it harder to get into it. Linksys recommends you change this often.
Turn off DHCP:This one is a big one, easy to fix, but a big one none the less. Why? Well let's say that someone happened to find your network, all they would have to do is connect to it and then they would be given an DHCP assigned IP address and would be able to access your network resources because your router didn't know that you didn't want them on. And lets get serious, how many of you have so many machines on your network that it would take more than a few seconds to give each machine a static ip? This will at least make them work at getting on.
Turn on WEP Encryption:Ok, I want to make one thing perfectly clear, WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) will not make you safe; it will just make it harder for a hacker to break in. You are not impenetrable because you run WEP Encryption.
Enable MAC address filtering:This will allow your router to only provide access to those MAC address that you assign here. This will take some time, but it does help secure your network. No, this is not a full proof measure, but it will make it harder for someone to gain access. They will have work at it.
Last but not least, Update your firmware to the latest and greatest. This will hopefully fix any bugs that have been found for your router and also help with any known security flaws in the router itself.As I said before I am no wireless security expert, and I'm sure I've left some stuff out. But in the most part if you do the above steps your wireless network will be harder to gain access to than if you left just the defaults.